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Thursday, 18 July 2013

Today on my blog I’m delighted to
welcome one of my favourite authors. His name is David Thomas although he has
used the pseudonym Tom Cain for his series of books about the assassin Samuel
Carver.

Before anyone thinks of getting
into the whole JK Rowling nonsense about the use of pseudonyms, I should point
out that when David released his first novel – the utterly excellent Accident
Man – he was working as a journalist. Hence the pseudonym.

The day this post goes live is the
same day his latest Tom Cain book goes into paperback and his novel Ostland is
released (under David Thomas)have read
both books and cannot recommend them highly enough.

Anyway, here’s David talking about
Ostland and the factors which drove him to write the story.

Every novel I have ever written has
begun in a single, distinct moment. Sometimes it’s a visual image, or a line of
dialogue that arrives, as fleeting as a ghost in the early hours of the
morning. Once it was an unplanned, hungover visit to an exhibition of Japanese
art. In the case of Ostland, it was a line in a Sunday newspaper book review.

The book was ‘Berlin at War’ by the
historian Roger Moorhouse. The reviewer described a story told in the book
about a serial killer who preyed on solitary female travellers on the city’s
‘S-Bahn’ railway network. That was interesting enough, but then, at the end of
the paragraph was a throw-away line saying that one of the detectives who had
investigated the crime had subsequently become a major war-criminal.

I was
immediately gripped by the idea of a man who was somehow transformed from the
heroic figure of a detective tracking down an evil killer-rapist into the
ultimate villain, a genocidal Nazi mass-murderer. I bought and greatly enjoyed Berlin at War and
discovered the detective’s name: Georg Heuser. Then began months of research as
I tried to piece together the story of a young man – we first meet him a few
days before his 28th birthday – whose war was spent in an
extraordinary and in many ways tragic journey from dazzling, golden promise to
the absolute heart of darkness.

Heuser was a
brilliant detective. He graduated top of his class at the police ‘LeadersSchool’ for men on the fast-track to the
top. His reward was a posting as personal assistant to Wilhelm Lüdtke, the
chief of the Berlin
murder squad, who was engaged in the hunt for the S-Bahn murderer. Heuser
distinguished himself in the investigation and was the arresting officer when
the killer was finally tracked down. He was then invited to co-write the
official report on the investigation in the German Journal of Criminology.

What’s more, unlike
most ambitious German policemen in the Third Reich, Heuser was never a member
of the Nazi Party. He was not anti-Semitic. He had no psychotic or violent
tendencies. Yet, in late 1941 he was sent to the Russian city of Minsk, then part of the
new German colony of Ostland. And there Georg Heuser participated in a series
of horrifying mass-murders. He helped plan the transportation and execution of
tens of thousands of Jews. He stood in line with his SS comrades and shot men,
women and children cold-bloodedly in the back of the head. And he personally
executed Russian women accused of being spies, dumping their corpses in the
dead of night, just as the S-Bahn murderer had done.

The obvious
question is: why? What could make an otherwise decent man behave in such an
appalling, unforgivable way? What went on in his head as he descended into the
depths?

That is the
question Ostland attempts to answer. It contains two detective stories in which
Georg Heuser is the hero of one case and the villain of the other. There are
three love stories, each of which I hope casts some light on the emotional and
psychological impulses of Heuser, his victims and the post-war German
investigators shining a light on past evils that many of their
fellow-countrymen would rather have kept well hidden. And, of course, it is one
more book about the Nazis.

But do we really
need another one of those?

I certainly
asked myself that. I’m wary of the concentration we place on the evils of
Nazism as if they were in some way unique. The constant harping on the terrible
crimes of fascism means that far too little attention is paid to the equal
wrongs perpetrated by communist dictators: Stalin, Mao and all their imitators.
Anyone with even a suspicion of neo-Nazi loyalties is rightly condemned, yet
academics and politicians who never abandoned, still less repented their
communist allegiances can go to their graves without a stain on their
reputations. My unease at that double-standard was one the reasons why my
previous book, Blood Relative had former agents of the East German secret
police, the Stasi as its villains.

But the Nazis
are far more familiar to us than the Stalinists and Maoists. They’re closer to
us geographically, culturally and in our imaginations. And that means that
there is another question asked by Ostland: would any of us, facing the same
circumstances as Georg Heuser be any better than him?

No one country
or ideology has the monopoly on genocide, ethnic cleansing, mass-murder,
oppression or brutality. Nor can many nations claim to be completely innocent.
Ostland describes in extreme detail a twisted world in which normal, everyday
men could carry out atrocities so vile as to be unimaginable by any sane human
being: a world in which the women who lived and worked alongside those men
could happily wear coats and dresses stolen from the bodies of the dead.

Hitler and his
henchmen created a psychotic system that condemned millions to extermination,
and condemned those who killed them to damnation. Some say the Germans were
‘willing executioners’. I say, look at the quartermaster’s records. They reveal
that the number of vodka bottles drunk by the SS men in Minsk was almost exactly the same as the
number of Jews they killed. These pre-war policemen, car mechanics, teachers
and farmers could only implement the Final Solution by obliterating their
consciences with alcohol: one bottle per victim. They knew they were doing
something unfathomably wrong. And yet they kept drinking and kept killing too.

I was talking
about all this to a friend of mine who happens to be Jewish. Seeing that the
experience of researching and writing Ostland had affected me very deeply he
tried to give me words of reassurance: ‘Don’t worry, I know that if you’d been
in Heuser’s place, you’d never have shot anyone.’

Monday, 8 July 2013

Over the last few weeks I’ve been hard at
work tormenting myself to death. Yes folks, it’s that time all writers learn to
love and hate; the editing of a novel.

It’s a great feeling to see your words
being crafted into something meaningful and entertaining. Once or twice I’ve
found little passages or a sentence that made me go “fuck yeah” such was the
beauty or power of the words in front of me.

Sadly however, no sweary word has been left
un-muttered at the endless repetitions, unnecessary alliteration or stuff that
is just plain stupid or unbelievable or just shit.

I mean, what the hell was I thinking of
when I wrote some of that nonsense? Where did all the “that’s, then’s, which’s,
who’s and and’s” come from? I certainly (Shit! Just used an adverb. That’ll
need edited out) don’t remember writing them. And don’t get me started on
contractions!

The fact I chose to write without dialogue
tags only makes things harder as I have to craft ways of informing the reader
who’s speaking.

Yes my novel is getting better and
altogether tighter because of this vital and necessary editing. If I’m lucky
enough to get any interest from a publisher or agent, I’m sure that I’ll be
handed a massive batch of suggestions to tighten it further but until that day
(if that day ever comes) then I’m concentrating on getting it as good as I possibly
can.

This editing has now crept into my writing
on every level. After the first round of edits, I wrote a couple of short
stories and I could sense the first draft was technically tighter than (Fuck.
Adverb and alliteration.) any previous first draft. Even stuff I write at work
or Facebook now gets the same attention to detail when it doesn’t need it.

When this edit is complete I will be
handing it over to my wife to proof read. Cue several yards of red ink on each
page and more un-muttered swearing.

So peeps. Am I on the write (You see what I
did there?) track or am I just driving myself insane? All comments welcome.